On the menu tonight, a sweet Riesling from down under in south Australia. Oh so smooth and when chilled, a lovely companion for a hot Texas summer grillout. Tasty! Brought to you by “some young punks” who have a very hip website. And some killer artwork on this bottle. Great job, you punks. Should make for a nice evening

The back of the bottle shows some samples of the art from their other wines, as you can see on their site. Some pretty sultry stuff! I’ll have to look for those next time I’m in the store! ;D

Hot on the heels of the last entry in the Primo Vino Art series, which celebrates cool wine labels, I bring you this: X Winery

Pairs well with SCIENCE. And snarky, morbidly humourous artificial intelligence.

It actually does pair well with science, what with an infinite number of potential riffs like “solve for x” or “plot x versus inebriation” and so forth. I’ll just stop there.

Indeed X does mark the spot, and this is a very pleasing cabernet blend. Suprisingly smooth, yet not flavorless! Usually it seems like those two qualities are mutually exclusive. Perhaps they still are, but the bar graphs are fairly even here at least. Drink up… you monster.

How many times have you bought a certain wine just because the label grabbed you? If you’re anything like me, the answer is probably uncountable. I do have certain wines that I keep coming back to, but on the whole, I like to experiment and try new things, see what’s out there.

In this spirit, there’s a new series in town, and it’s called Primo Vino Art. It’s just basically wine bottles that I think look cool. We’ll kick it off with this über-nerdy label for a California vintner called Educated Guess.

Saw it at Whole Foods and just had to try it based on the bottle alone. Happily, this was one of the more intricate and tasty bottles I’ve had lately, so I think I will be returning to it. For me, a wine has got to have subtlety and nuance to make it worth giving it a second go-round, and I have already bought my second bottle of this!

Also, I’ve been trading vintage photoshop tricks with a certain mister Ryan Allen lately, and a picture I took of this bottle got the full treatment, so it seems appropriate to post it here. For those so interested, there’s vignetting, chromatic aberration added (via ‘lens correction’), a red/green color gradient layer with low opacity (makes the colors look like a faded 80’s photo, a strong light leak coming from the upper right, and a bunch of extras applied in a PS actions file Ryan sent. In the future, there might be some photoshop tutorials dished on these subjects, but for now, enjoy the retro-goodness:

Share this:

Third apple in the ongoing series, today we look at the Pepin Heights Sweet Sixteen apple. With a name like that, you KNOW it’s gonna be good.

And tasty it was! It was not as sweet as you might guess from the name, although there was not even a hint of tartness in this apple, so when you take a bite, all you taste is the sweetness. The texture on the inside is quite soft, in an excellent way. Typically I prefer my apples to be more like 7.5ish on the “crunchy inside” scale, but this type is well-worthy of an exception to that preference. The texture of it sort of makes it candy-like. You’d have no trouble getting kids to eat these.

The skin on the apple was not crunchy at all. It seemed to want to remain in strips, like you could almost peel this apple just by peeling back the skin. I tried it, and you could actually peel it, just like an orange once you tried for a little bit. Unusual skin for an apple, but it was cool in it’s own odd way.

These apples, peeled, would make an absolutely incredible pie or crisp. If there are still some left at the grocery store next week, I think I might try that. Irregardless of how I plan to eat them, I definitely want to get more of these. They are a most delicious apple!